The Black Sphinx

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Throbbing subsides. Shape returns. If there had been discoloration, it did not show. If there was about to be some, it wasn't heralded. No crater had formed. Not even the tiniest crack or fissure. Normalcy had been restored. It was over.
But the lava had been denied an outlet. It was rising. Rising and descending. To the left and to the right. Moving along the bloodstream. To meet an eventual release. A suitable climax. The pyroclastic flow would come. A darkness creeps inside. His shadow steps out to stand beside him.
Sound. It would come with longitudinal waves in the air around him; the pattern of specific regions of compressions and rarefactions. Whether it would be the sharp twang of a taut string, or the smooth sliver of a butcher's knife, or the dull smack of meat being thrown onto his table. He did not know. Not yet.
Bubbles rise through liquid gold as green leaves burn and dissolve in smoke. Burn and rise. Rise and burn. Mingle with the lava inside.Unholy mixture to which he now abandons his body and mind. Blood and ashes. Spit and dirt. Unseemly spectacle of torrid visions. An act of love, an instrument of torture. The mind is the greatest. Doer of evil or feather of a fairy. To hurt more than her words ever could. Brown fumes encircle his thoughts. Coiling serpents. Bared venom. Fangs dig deep as the lava boils over.
There is no one in his tree. He crouches on a lonely branch, pebbles in hand, hurling them at passers-by, biting them till his gums bleed. To come near would be to share. To touch and see and feel what is his and his alone. He was saving himself from their apathy, them from his darkness.
The cork is still in place. Unmoved and untouched, its necessity hardly evident. The bottle, a picture of serenity from the outside. Living a lie that was fast becoming his reality. Dreaming till he has forgotten that he is asleep. Of golden slumbers and silver hammers.

Friday, January 7, 2011

“Deal with it!”, she said and left. He didn’t even look as she walked away. The darkness enveloped her beautiful form as she faded out- his angel or an evil fairy. Maybe beyond the veil of darkness the nether regions opened up to swallow her in, maybe not. He didn’t look. He didn’t need to. He saw enough of her already. In dreams, in visions that shook his existence to its core, in idle thoughts, his repeatedly revised imaginations of what must have been-each more terrifying than the previous. “Deal with it!” The words resounded in his head, as if the living world around him had absorbed its meaning just then and was feeding it back to him. Easy to say. But to him it only added to the bad memories that he already had of the things that had been spoken by her pretty mouth. The mouth that had also given him all that he had to live for. The feel of which on his lips.......but it hurt too much to think of that right now. Strange how the very thing that makes your life worth living is also the thing that makes you want to die. And not any violent or sudden ‘DEATH’-no getting shot in the head, or jumping off a roof; that would be too sudden. He wouldn’t have any time to rewind and replay his life, between the time he initiated the act and the time it reached its conclusion. Slow and painful deaths like poison, or disease, or strangulation weren’t good options either. Because then he would have ample time and reflecting back on his life, and of their happier moments together would make him want to reverse the process. What he wanted was to just fade away. Slowly, and unintentionally-like a piece of dry ice. He wanted to turn into a ghost, become a part of the darkness, something that could stick to the ceiling and sleep within floors. He wanted to take on the identity of whatever he came into contact with. He wanted to whither, and evaporate.

The street lamps burned with all their ferocity, their harsh amberness doing its utmost to stave off the darkness rushing up at him from all sides, and from within. And although he was thankful to their valiant efforts, the idea of getting crushed by the darkness wasn’t too undesirable, and even welcomed. Maybe if he let it happen, that would wipe out all emotions, and leave him without hurt and pain. But then he wanted to be able to love too. She deserved to be loved, and cared for, and hurt. Maybe if it just wiped out all his memories, barring the good ones, but he didn’t figure it worked that ways. He raised his head and dared a glance in the direction in which she had gone. She wasn’t there, just lesser mortals, flitting around, too engaged in their own mundane lives and bonds and problems. Somewhere in the background, two nubile bodies were meeting, in a dance of passion, expressing for each other what their mouths could not say. At that moment, a guttural roar arose from his soul, his very depths. The moon seemed to descend low, spreading its unearthly light all around. He hoped she could hear him. He hoped she knew how he suffered, so that she would suffer too. Yes he hoped SHE suffered; for loving him so much, for making him her only light in the darkness, for holding his hand when he was weak, for guiding him through when he was lost. For these sins, she must have pain, the way he was having it. He wanted to hold her in a tight embrace, and make love to her as the fires of hell swallowed them both, consuming and feasting on them and their love till they were both just halves in a whole.

The cold made him shudder. He smiled and walked away; he didn’t want to fall ill.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Monday, August 16, 2010

He sat in the dark room alone, in front of his laptop. Bathed in blue, he stared at the screen with glazed and tired eyes. A blank word document stared back at him, equally tired. It was the first time in the entire day that he had found some time for himself, his roommate having gone off somewhere, which he, although told, did not remember. He stared out of his window, lowering the screen of his laptop to reduce the glare. Nothing. The night seemed as dark on the outside as it was inside. The darkness seemed more to be streaming out of his room rather than pouring in. Not giving into the exasperation he tried her numbers again. And again he was told the very same stuff. One number was switched off, the other not reachable. A sudden surge of irritation made him want to throw his phone out of the window. But then, he doubted whether it would ever hit solid ground, and not keep on falling forever. And the latter was not something he wanted, coz then it would not break on impact (and therefore, would not be an ideal vent for his anger), and it would be irretrievable. He chose to do nothing. He closed his eyes for a while, letting the darkness envelope him completely, and concentrated on the sounds instead. There was the rapid whirring of his ceiling fan. Every now and then, he could hear voices that belonged to the outside world. Voices of people moving about, rapidly rising in pitch and then suddenly fading away, like apparitions. Like anger. They seemed like stabs of a dagger on his hard-worked meditation. They made him wince, and curse.

He opened his eyes, letting the visual stimuli flood back into his self. He picked up his phone and called her again. Still nothing. Giving it up, he removed the ear-phones he had jacked into his phone and turned his attention to the two glow-worms hovering near his window, doing some sort of weird dance. Maybe it was a mating ritual, he thought. But then the duo could be duelling for all he knew. Maybe they were doing those elaborate patterns just to make him sit back and ponder about it the way he was now. In that case, were they trying to divert his attention away from the problems of his life? Or was it to irritate him further? And if it was the latter, why was he helping them succeed by doing exactly what they wanted him to do?

The last thought made him swing into action. He got up and switched on the lights. Harsh white light surged into his world like a swarm of locusts. It pained his senses and his mind. He immediately wanted to switch them off but had already laid back in his bed and did not want any more physical exertion to divert his mind away from its meditation. He looked up and could now see the fan which produced the whirring sound he had gotten so familiar with a little while before. Somehow, for some strange reason, the sound did not seem as warm and comforting any more. As if visual proof of its source robbed it of its sense of belonging. The whole observation made him wonder if sight is overhyped as a sensory perception. Maybe we place it at a pedestal which belongs to the more subtle senses; the senses of sound, of touch and taste, the ones that left at least something to our imaginations.

Having hit upon this thought, he got up to switch off the light and at that moment, the screen of his phone lit up and started blinking at a steady speed. It was her. He looked at the screen for a while and then at his ear-phones which he had unjacked from his phone. He turned his gaze back to the blank document while the song played itself out and the phone stopped blinking.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

He sat on the steps of the gallery, somewhere in the lower half. There was a moon that night, although its light couldn’t make its presence felt , being no competition for the harsh electrical halogen lamps lighting up the place. It made him wonder about how big a role physical proximity played, the moon being so luminous, yet its sheer distance from us making it ineffectual compared to a measly 500-watt electrical light. Could this hold good for other aspects of life too? Could this to be the answer to his problems?

As this thought crossed his mind, he returned his gaze from the moon to her. She was standing there, drinking water. He watched with lustful eyes, as her slender neck moved rhythmically to allow the water to pour in. Even though he could not see it, being so far away, he could imagine the odd drop of water trickling down her chin from a corner of her lips. The drop would dangle down from her chin for a while, he thought, swaying with the wind and her own movements, till it finally lost contact and fell down onto the ground, getting splattered against the hard surface. Because even for something as inanimate and mindless as a drop of water, such good fortune could not last long. It had to make way for something or someone else; someone, he hoped, someone, him. The halogen light that fell so harshly on him softened down by the time it reached her, such that the warm and sober amber shade seemed to be just another thing that she was wearing. And while dresses make people look pretty, here it was her beautiful form that increased the glory of the amberness silhouetting her. If she wanted, she could just cast it off and walk away unscathed, while the light would lose all its divinity and charm.

“So, are you not gonna go back or what?”, a sudden voice interrupted his meditation.It was a friend, and he saw that he was packed and ready to leave for the evening.

“No dude, you guys go ahead, i’ll sit here a while longer”, he replied in a voice that was intended to make it clear to them that they were intruding into something very private here.

This time it worked. His friend went away, joined his gang and started walking away. He watched them go and looked back to where he had seen her last standing. She wasn’t there. His eyes scanned the remaining people in various final stages of packing up and leaving. No. And then it struck him. so engrossed he had been in watching her that he had completely missed the fact that she had been packing up all the while. And now she had left. He ran to the exit. This time he didn’t have to search. Not so far away, he saw her walking away. An angel in a crowd of lesser mortals. As he watched she leaned and put her head on the shoulders of one of the latter. He was with her.

He whistled a slow tune as he walked back to where he was sitting and started packing up. The moon continued to shine brightly still.